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The first thing you need to know about French Montana is that back-to-back subsections on his otherwise disorganized Wikipedia page are "Shooting Attempts" and "Exotic Pets." At the beginning of this decade, the Bronx-bred rapper was drifting somewhere between "budding star" and "also-ran," hawking DVDs and mixtapes anchored by his more-famous friends. By the end of 2014, he was living a parallel life as Fitzgeraldian social climber stuck in a real-life safari of leopards and Kardashians. (Here's a video called "2 Chainz and French Montana Feed a $40K Giraffe.")

Last May, Chinx, a Far Rockaway native who was a close friend to and collaborator with French, was killed in a still-unsolved shooting. (The NYPD has said that they believe his murder might be tied to the 2007 killing of Stack Bundles, another collaborator.) It's in the shadow of that tragedy that French's new mixtape, Wave Gods, begins: "They threw me in the black hole, I had to climb up/ Once Chinx passed, I took some time off." On the tape's cover, French is joined by Max B, his kindred creative spirit who isn't up for parole until 2042. He's finally at the top—or at least adjacent to it—but he had to come alone.

Wave Gods hears French bring moments of tragedy and Technicolor excess to life frequently and in equal measure. "Holy Moly" is all joy ("My bitch from Cuba and my lawyer Jewish"); on the "Sanctuary" remix, he borrows the Weeknd's "Bring the drugs, baby, I'ma bring my pain." Sometimes, they're shoehorned into the same verse: on the Kanye West- and Nas-featuring "Figure It Out," French considers Chinx and Max, Eazy E, Allen Iverson, and Bill Cosby, but also slips in "Why I fucked them both when they said they're sisters?" and you can practically hear him grinning at the camera.

Until now, French had spent much of his career as the weakest, or at least most anonymous rapper in the room. Most fans push both Coke Wave installments into the Max B canon. His introduction to pop audiences came on "Stay Schemin," which was more noted for Drake's shots at Common and Vanessa Bryant. His 2013 Bad Boy/Maybach Music Group debut, Excuse My French, had more guests (Drake, Nicki, Wayne, Snoop) than tracks, suffered dismal reviews, and failed to sell 100,000 copies. Worse still, his detractors—many of whom were presumably unfamiliar with his earlier work—wrote him off as a relic from a dead era, a last gasp for old New York heads who couldn't or wouldn't get with the times.

In reality, French was never a classicist in any sense, and certainly not a '90s revivalist. His golden age was the mid- and late-2000s, when Wayne and T-Pain dominated radio, and when Max was turning Harlem into a grim, funhouse mirror version of that sound. On Wave Gods, French has improved his writing, sure, but more importantly has imagined a world where that sound became the dominant commercial mode, where the precision of trap or the maximalism of drill never took over, where we're left with something more stripped down, woozier, wavier.

And so this time, the guests bend into his orbit. Quavo's staccato triplets on "Groupie Love" are blunted by the Auto-Tune. Kodak Black is 13 years younger and from 1,200 miles south, but on "Lock Jaw" sounds like he's been locked in a give-and-go for years. On "Jackson 5," he puts an original stamp on the same sort of soul loops that have been dominating the city's mixtape circuit since the early W. Bush years. The prevailing atmosphere on Wave Gods is so strong that the one time French does yield home court, to Future on "Miley Cyrus," it's jarring, despite being an excellent song in its own right.

Wave Gods ends with two appearances from Chinx—"All Over" and yet another remix of "Off the Rip." It's a touching tribute from an artist who was eager to share the spotlight when it was a necessity, and remains so now that he can carry songs on his own. "Rip" in particular is moving in this new context, at its strange intersection of celebration and memorial. A$AP Rocky, the song's latest guest, implores the audience to "pay attention, I'm the main event." That might have been true before, but it isn't anymore.